Destabilizing to Stabilize: Interstate Dispute Escalation & Leadership Transitions in China

I show that China’s leaders have a history of militarily escalating disputes with other states in the time directly preceding and succeeding leadership transitions. In fact, over 60 percent of incidents of escalation by China that occurred between 1989 and 2013 transpired around leadership transitions. I theorize that this previously unidentified pattern of escalation is motivated by concerns over domestic instability, and that it represents concessions to China’s hawkish issue publics to shore up stability at critical junctures. I illustrate the logic of that strategy with a simple formal model. Using maximum likelihood estimation, I find that there is a significant positive relationship between interstate dispute escalation and leadership transition. Of note, it is generally accepted that China has favored win-win diplomatic solutions to its disputes with other states. Instances of escalation have thus been largely categorized as aberrant behavior. My identification of this pattern of escalation challenges this logic and suggests that the militarization of disputes has at times been a routine and strategic undertaking by the leaders of China’s Communist Party.